Last 31st May 2018, I co-organized, and took part in, an event on the “Future of Computing & Food” (part of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces 2018) in Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy. Here, a group of academics, practitioners, a Chef, and local food producers gathered and kick-started the co-creation of a Manifesto on the Future of Computing & Food. Below, I present the key points of the manifesto (click here for full access to the output document).

Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy.

Manifesto on the Future of Computing & Food

I. Educate people about the impact of ‘what they eat’ on their own health and wellbeingII. Promote the sense of communal participation and its importance to foodIII. Optimize food equality by reducing food waste and increasing access to nutritious foodIV. Help people in recognising the basic sensory, hedonic, and social functions of foodsV. Provide just-in-time feedback on purchase, storage and consumption of foodVI. Foster the relevance of personal, social, and cultural experiences related to foodVII. Enable data-driven (real-time, large scale) informed food policy decision makingVIII. Avoid one-fits-all solutions that undermine personal freedom of choiceIX. Ensure total transparency on the origin and heritage of foodX. Celebrate each actor in the food system (farmer to Chef) to create a sustainable system

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘sharp’ applied first to touch, then subsequently to taste (ca. 1000), visual shape (1340), and hearing (1390)” (Marks, 1978, p. 190; see also Williams, 1976). It would seem possible that the use of the term ‘sharp’ to describe a taste or flavour attribute actually reflects an implicit association between shape and taste/flavour quality (e.g., Velasco, Woods, Marks, Cheok, & Spence, 2016).

Note, however, that the way in which descriptors in one sensory modality apply to another sensory modality, may vary as a function of language (e.g., Shayan, Ozturk, Bowerman, & Majid, 2014; Shayan, Ozturk, & Sicoli, 2011). For example, Fenko, Otten, and Schifferstein (2010) have pointed to the fact that the word ‘sharp’ in Russian (острый) has a stronger association with gustation than with touch, whilst in English and Dutch, the words ‘sharp’ and ‘scherp’, respectively, have a stronger association with touch than with gustation.

Nevertheless, recent research has demonstrated that people do indeed match tastes (tastants and taste words) with shape aesthetic features such as curvature and symmetry of visual shapes. Those associations have been demonstrated in crossmodal matching tasks (Salgado-Montejo et al., 2015; Velasco, Woods, Deroy, & Spence, 2015) and have also been shown to give rise to crossmodal congruency effects (Velasco et al., 2016).